STRUCTURES

Yesterday in class our group presented what we had been working on in the past week.

I told the class of my failed phone projector. For my first trial I used a small gift box and the smallest magnifying lens that I could find, just to see how small we could actually go. It didn’t work, I think because the lens didn’t let enough light through to get a good image, and because the box was so small that the phone wasn’t far enough away from the lens. We tried making a second one in class and it worked much better. We used a bigger box, bigger than a shoebox, and a medium sized magnifying lens. In a dark room we managed to get a good picture on a white wall, but the images that came out best were light coloured images. It is important to note that some tips online have said to boost the brightness of the phones screen to get a good image.

We also wrote a draft mission statement so that we work in the coming weeks towards a clear goal:

MISSION STATEMENT

Our creative response to the media idea ‘text’ is a sculpture that explores the ways that texts make meaning through representations of women. Each component of the sculpture is informed by a feminist approach to textual analysis with aims to reveal how texts can influence and reiterate the patriarchal unconscious of society.

Initially we wanted to create a media installation that would allow an audience to interact with the various media artefacts that we would create (moving image, audio, photographs, and written text). Each component would offer the reader an opportunity to engage, decode and make meaning from the texts offered. Each component would also comment on how meaning is made with reference to textual analysis theories, and the components together would represent our whole understanding of the media idea ‘text’.

Over the past two weeks this concept has evolved and now reflects a more practical and personal experience for our intended audience. We decided to invert and downsize the installation, so that the interactive media components feature on the outside of a physical structure, rather than inside a room or public space. Our sculpture will be a rectangular prism, with each component placed on the sides of the structure, and our mission statement on the top to tie all the pieces together.

Our primary point of reference has been the influential essay of British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Our moving image component and the way that it is presented is directly motivated by this essay. Our sculpture will feature a small opening that a single viewer can look through, and inside the sculpture our moving image will be projected. This component will explore the idea of the male gaze and voyeurism and how it manifests in film, through a montage of clips depicting women from contemporary films.

Brian seemed worried that all our different components won’t be cohesive, but  one of our aims is to explore how different mediums combined make a whole new text (like a mixed-media installation) and how this reflects in the meaning-making process of the audience. Also all our components are so similar in what they explore. Anyway, we will see how it goes.

This week we are each doing a draft of one of the media components following guidelines agreed upon in class, as well as looking into more feminist theories.

mimo

My name is Mimo. I like to watch TV and films with my neighbour's cat.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *